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Friday’s morning markets

Dow Jones Industrial Average

15,221.12 -107.18 -0.70%

S&P 500 Index

1,689.94 -8.73 -0.51%

NASDAQ Composite Index

3,769.39 -18.03 -0.48%

S&P/TSX Composite Index

12,841.27 -0.35 -0.00%

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The struggling smartphone maker officially posted a quarterly loss of nearly $1-billion today and reported that revenue dived almost 50% — but its stock was climbing in early trading. The reason is investors had heard it all before as BlackBerry gave early warning of the dismal results last Friday — just days before accepting its largest shareholder’s tentative $4.7 billion bid to take it out of the public eye. The good news then was the results weren’t much worse than telegraphed. One of the uglier details on the release though was the $934-million writedown for unsold Z10 phones, the touchscreen model that the company had hoped would reverse its fading fortunes. “This write-off is very real,” Morningstar analyst Brian Colello told Reuters. “They bought a lot of inventory hoping to sell it. The auditors were not convinced that BlackBerry can sell it or sell it at prices that the company was hoping for. We see no reason to be more optimistic than them.” Perhaps in preparation for going private, BlackBerry also cancelled its after-earnings conference call scheduled for Friday.

Shelter, food, cable and Internet – they are the necessities of modern-day life, and Canadians pay a pretty penny for them, especially the latter two, reports the Financial Post‘s Christine Dobby. Canadian families spent an average of $185 per month on communications services in 2012, up from $181 in 2011, according to the latest monitoring report from Canada’s telecommunications regulator. The report, released Thursday, revealed that the communications industry as a whole generated more than $60-billion in revenues last year. The study from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released every September offers a wealth of information on what Canadians watch and listen to, how they do it and how much they spend on it. This year’s report found Canadians listened to slightly less radio and watched a bit less television in 2012 than in previous years, but they watched more TV shows through the Internet and listened to more music through streaming services. The CRTC said spending was up on wireless data and Internet services with faster broadband speeds. But the real kicker: the Big Three – BCE Inc., Telus Corp. and Rogers Communications Inc. – took home 92% of revenues in the sector and had 90% market share between them, the CRTC said.

Related: Public ‘sick and tired’ of Big Three telcos and ‘disgusted’ by recent wireless ad campaign – Postmedia News

Cracks in BlackBerry’s relationships

As BlackBerry faces an uncertain future and seeks to go private in a $4.7-billion deal, cracks are starting to show in the smartphone maker’s relationships with a major U.S. carrier, its electronics supplier and its large corporate clients, reports the Financial Post‘s Armina Ligaya. T-Mobile U.S. Inc., the fourth-largest carrier south of the border, told Bloomberg it will stop stocking BlackBerry smartphones in its stores, instead opting to ship the devices directly to any customers who are interested. Meanwhile, electronics supplier Jabil Circuit Inc. said it “faces a strong possibility of disengaging” with the Waterloo, Ont.-based company in the coming months. “The weakening of those relationships is a natural consequence of blacker demand for BlackBerrys,” said IDC mobile analyst Kevin Restivo. “The adverse landscape facing BlackBerry right now has caused two of its partners to make difficult choices.” BlackBerry said on Monday it had entered into a tentative agreement to sell itself to its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., for US$4.7-billion or US$9 a share.